Tuesday, 9 April 2013

Transforming Digital Landfills to Competitive Knowledge Assets

In today’s digital economy the currency of exchange is
information. With the volume of electronically stored information estimated at
2.7 zettabytes and growing 48% annually the value of information as a strategic
resource must be reliable, relevant, current and readily accessible.

This unprecedented growth in the volume and variety of digital
content represents both opportunities and challenges for business and public
sector organizations alike. For businesses competing in the digital economy
agility in leveraging information is an imperative in order to minimize
transaction costs and grow revenue. For public sector agencies the need for
more efficient constituency services delivery is paramount at a time of
increasing budgetary constraints. The growth of digital content also brings
about increasing complexities associated with its collection, use and
disposition. They encompass protection of privacy and intellectual property rights
as well as disclosure and transparency obligations.

Lack of effective content management and preservation best
practices may result in exposure to legal risks, lower staff productivity, in
higher transaction costs and in ineffective customer and constituency service
levels. While these challenges relating to digital content are self-evident
organizations continue to struggle in harnessing its strategic value. Content
continues to proliferate in disparate email in-boxes, shared drives, in
un-managed repositories and in legacy systems. In fact a recent AIIM study
revealed that only 30% of the organizations surveyed felt that their content is
reasonably well managed. Moreover the same study found that 40% of
organizations surveyed have three or more EDRMS systems in place, while at the
same time 40% of respondents continue to manage and store business critical
information in personal Outlook folders.

These inefficiencies often result in fragmented information
repositories and data duplication. Given the declining cost of storage the
propensity is to continue creating content without the benefit of having a
consistent information governance framework in place. When a decision is made
to consolidate heterogeneous content repositories into a more organized and
centralized system of record the assumption is made that migrating the content
is a relatively simple exercise. However, the challenge associated content
migration is often underestimated. The result may be substituting one
inefficient and unreliable content repository with another albeit within a
managed EDRMS.

Efficient content migration must be a high priority. The challenge
is that multiple versions of documents may exist in multiple places. There may
be records that are not properly declared and classified. Bulk migration of
content to an EDRMS without proper clean up and classification may result in
the same problem as persists with un-managed content.

An interesting approach to effective content migration is provided
by www.conceptsearching.com Their Smart Content Framework™ methodology
provides the building blocks to leverage content assets to reduce
organizational risk by providing a framework for identifying, cleansing,
de-duping and organizing information assets through:

§Automatic
intelligent content routing as defined by an organization’s information
governance policies; and

§Populating
content to any target EDRMS such as Microsoft SharePoint or Open Text Content
Server.

The expected outcome of intelligent content migration is to
transform content into business value, reduce duplication, overlap, improve
information relevance so that when content is migrated into the desired target
EDRMS repository is of high quality, reliable, authentic and meets operational
and compliance requirements.

CORADIX will be holding a complimentary seminar on intelligent
content migration. The objective of the seminar is to share insights relating
to:

§How to avoid
moving your content debris from one place to another;

§What
classification is and how to do it;

§Which tools
make auto-classification easy;

§How to deal
with sheer volume of content; and

§How to
effectively migrate content to either a Microsoft SharePoint or Open Text Content
Server EDRMS environments.